Isn’t it every developer dream to have his own command line & scaffolding tool? Do we really save time by creating and using those? I’m not quite sure but I certainly feel fancy when I use them.

Enter Yeoman, a tool that streamline your front-end development. or so it seems.

Frankly while I now “get” grunt.js and bower, I’m not sure I completely get Yeoman. The idea behind yeoman is to give you the best boilerplate possible to get started with your app development. In some way, yeoman is awesome, from the get go you get a css preprocessor compiler, js compiler, folder watchers, test server and much much more.

But that just how grunt work (pure awesomeness), that’s just one gruntFile.js that you can steal, integrate and modify pretty easily. Other than that Yeoman will enable you to scaffold projects with generators, and that’s where it start to get awkward. Yeoman assume a lot of stuff about how you work (giving you a better workflow as they say), and integrating it in a well under-development project seems impossible or too long to be worth it in my opinion.

My advice? At least have a look at yeoman, maybe it is for you. If it’s not, absolutely save their grunt config somewhere, that is worth a lot of time and money.

3 thoughts on “Yeoman and friends”

I gave Yeoman a try some while ago; While I like the concept, I didn’t quite get it either; I personally am using Brunch instead of Grunt and it works for me.

When I tried configuring Yeoman’s Gruntfile I found I was more limited than with Brunch alone, but maybe this is just me not being used to Grunt.

I’m curious too hear what’s your take about this, if you ever used Brunch in comparison to Grunt. For instance, I couldn’t figure out how to have only Coffeescript files in the source folder and have them compiled and concatenated as one JS file in the build folder, with no temp fodler or anything in between. Thing that brunch does beautifully.

You can create multiple tasks for one plugin, if I understand your question correctly, you can easily create an uglify task with a *.coffee wildcard that will do this, and add a watcher on that folder for profit
‘scripts/main.js’: [ ‘scripts/*. coffee’]